During the shipment of products in commerce via train, boat or airplane, for example, products are many times placed on a pallet, or on or in another suitable structure, and shipped. A recipient of a pallet ideally has a way of verifying that the contents of the pallet that was received equals the expected or contents of the pallet that was actually shipped. In other words, the recipient would like to be able to perform an integrity check to verify that the items contained on the pallet are the items originally shipped or the “expected items” for that pallet. Many situations can arise causing the shipped contents of the pallet to be different than the received contents of the pallet, such as theft of items on the pallet during transport between the shipper of the pallet and the recipient of the pallet. Another situation where an integrity check is required is authentication of products being shipped to ensure the products are actually from the purported manufacturer of the products. This is particularly important in the context of pharmaceuticals where the sale of counterfeited drugs on the gray market is a serious problem.
In an attempt to better authenticate pallets and the items contained on such pallets, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags may be placed on the pallet and items contained thereon. These RFID tags contain information identifying the pallet and information that may be utilized to determine whether the contents of the pallet have been altered during shipment. For example, an RFID tag may indicate the weight of the shipped pallet, the number of items on the shipped pallet, the number of items of each specific type on the pallet, or the physical size or volume of the pallet. Any variation between the information in the RFID tag and the actual corresponding physical characteristic of the received pallet indicates the contents of the pallet may have been altered during shipment.
A common way to check the integrity of a pallet to determine whether the shipped contents correspond to the received contents is through the use of an “aggregation tree.” An identification tree defines relationships among items on the pallet and the pallet itself by defining an identification associated with the pallet as a root of the tree and defining identifications associated with each of the items contained of the pallet as leaves of the tree. In current integrity checking systems utilizing such a system, RFID tags physically attached to the pallet and to the items contained on the pallet are read and input to a backend system which then compares the read identifiers from the RFID tags to the expected identifiers stored in a database on the backend system. Thus, the backend system must be accessed for each received pallet to retrieve expected data for that pallet from the database. In many situations, however, the backend infrastructure system is not presently available.
There is a need for performing simpler and more efficient integrity checks on pallets and the contents of such pallets without requiring a backend infrastructure system.